This spring, Los Angeles-based artist Xany Rudoff will be debuting her new work, the Icon Series, which features vintage album covers that have been painted and embellished using Renaissance techniques to affect the look of religious icon paintings. Trained at one of the most prestigious fine art programs in the country, UCLA, where she graduated Magna Cum Laude, Rudoff has been making art and stirring things up for some time, and there's a paper trail to prove it: shes been featured in the New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine and Vanity Fair Magazine. Her work has previously appeared in group exhibitions and benefits, but this latest venture will be her first major solo show.

Always one to rail against convention, Rudoff remains an independent artist outside of the gallery system and a vocal advocate for changing the way the art world operates. Rudoff is passionate about pushing for artists to have more control over their work and to reap the benefits from the potential resale of their pieces. Currently, artists only receive income from the first sale of a piece, but should a work be re-sold for a much higher price, they don't get a percentage. This is not the way it should be, Rudoff notes, and points to recent changes in England, France, and the European Union where a royalty is payable to an artist or the artists heirs every time a work is re-sold as evidence that the system can and should be changed. And one reason that Rudoff has chosen to create and sell her work in California is a little-known state law that requires that an artist receive royalties on the re-sale of fine art.

Her latest work, The Icon Series, transforms vintage LP covers into luminous, religious art objects of the present. In these works, Rudoff explores the idea of the iconic by using found albums such as David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, etc. that feature images that are as visually iconic as they are historic. Borrowing the visual language of Byzantine master painters to push this idea even further, she uses centuries old techniques that mimics the making of traditional Renaissance icon paintings. Rudoff painstakingly applies genuine gold leaf to the albums surface, burnishes the gold to a mirror like sheen, then applies meticulous coats of paint and lacquer. The result is breathtaking work that luminesces with the burnished luster of a church fresco, but is intimate and personal in size and image: rock and roll icons made magnificent in a work that is at once transcendent and familiar. A painting the size of an LP that can be held in ones hands, transformed into an exultant and exuberant example of modern-day devotion.

BIO:

Xany Rudoff is a Los Angeles-based acclaimed artist who has also parlayed her talents in acting, interior design and wardrobe styling. Born in Pasadena, CA to an artist mother and art historian father, Rudoff moved with her family to the desert expanse of Apple Valley, CA, a site that would be crucial for her artistic development. In the wide, empty nothingness of the desert landscape, there were no limitations to Rudoff’s imagining, and upon returning to Los Angeles proper to get her B.A. in fine arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, she was able to see the city and the art world from the outside. This sort of perspective is what has driven her to remain independent, outside of the gallery system, and to advocate for artists’ right to receive royalties for the resale of their works.

"Ever since I was a child, I have been captivated by painting and music. I grew up surrounded by the vast, wide-open expanse of the desert landscape that would later prove to greatly influence my artistic vision, having no boundaries or limitations to my imagination. Being an artist was never a conscious decision, I have always been different, seeing the world not as it was, but as how I envisioned it: a magical world filled with enchantment and amazement, vivid mesmerizing colors, and always to a soundtrack of rock and roll. I always paint listening to music; the two are inseparable to me in the process of creation, the lines blurred as to which influences the other more. My latest series of work combines these passions together by taking the albums I grew up listening to and the rock stars I idolized and transforming them into modern day Icons - lusterized in gold and lacquer echoing the same techniques that have been used by artists for centuries throughout the Byzantine and Renaissance era. These paintings take the familiar and transcend into the iconic, an exultant and exuberant example of modern-day devotion.Music and art are my religion and my release." - Xany Rudoff

Her art appears in the collections of many notable collectors including actors Benicio Del Toro and Johnny Depp, director David Lynch, musician Albert Hammond Jr, iconic designer Peter Saville, Creation Records founder Alan McGee, pop singer Pink, The Libertine's Carl Barat, and Bauhaus’s David J, among many others. She is represented by Drate/ Salavetz in New York City, and the Saatchi Gallery in the UK.

In New York City she is handled exclusively by the dynamic design duo, Spencer Drate and Judith Salavetz- Grammy winning album cover designers and authors of the newly released book, "500 45's: A Graphic History of The Seven Inch Record".